This lesson plan tackles major personal finance issues in young people's futures: career choice, home buying, and budgeting. The lesson plan will teach high school students how education and skills impact career choice. It will also help students learn the basics of budgeting for big expenses, like mortgage payments. Students will learn about interest and loans, and how those personal finance tools can help them afford larger purchases like homes, while still managing their finances responsibly.

Grade Level:
Grades 7-12

Time Allotment:
3 classes at 45 minutes per class

Subject Matter:
Math, Finance, Economics

Learning ObjectivesStudents will:

Learn how education can impact career choice

Learn personal financial management

Comprehend mortgage structures

Learn about loans and interest rates

Understand the opportunity costs of financial decisions

Know the difference between savings and debt, and how they are both created

Learn how to budget

Understand a cost-benefit analysis

Have sufficient knowledge for personal financial decisions

Standards1. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
Principles and Standards for School Mathematics

Number and Operations

Understand numbers, ways of representing numbers, relationships among numbers, and number systems;

Understand meanings of operations and how they relate to one another;

Compute fluently and make reasonable estimates.

Problem Solving

Build new mathematical knowledge through problem solving;

Solve problems that arise in mathematics and in other contexts;

Apply and adapt a variety of appropriate strategies to solve problems;

Monitor and reflect on the process of mathematical problem solving.

Connections

Recognize and use connections among mathematical ideas;

Understand how mathematical ideas interconnect and build on one another to produce a coherent whole;

Recognize and apply mathematics in contexts outside of mathematics.

Representation

Create and use representations to organize, record, and communicate mathematical ideas;

Select, apply, and translate among mathematical representations to solve problems;

Use representations to model and interpret physical, social, and mathematical phenomena.